Leading Air Mobility Operations in Complex Humanitarian Emergencies: Joint Doctrine Review and Analysis, Practical Realities for Mission and Political Success, Who Moved My Cheese‪?‬

Professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction, this unique book provides an educational foundation for Mobility Air Forces (MAF) charged with leadership of complex humanitarian emergencies (CHE). The author provides a superb synthesis of a dozen years of lessons learned from many resources and institutions, sifting through the tactical and operational lessons learned so as to focus her research into the most important tenets for strategic success in a CHE: build a team of teams, gather and share information (not "intelligence"), and establish centers for interagency success. She reviews key joint and service doctrine manuals, culling critical nuances that would likely be overlooked by war fighters new to the CHE environment, or rushed in a crisis deployment. Her cultural comparison of the military and nongovernmental organizations is insightful and valuable. Throughout her work Colonel Isola provides tangible, real examples from past operations of what worked and what did not—and why. The implications for the future are clear.

The Mobility Air Forces (MAF) have sustained an extraordinary operations tempo for the last 10 years in performing peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance operations, not to mention a plethora of other operations and contingencies. Surely—one would assume—there must be a surfeit of documents capturing the experiences, struggles, successes, and lessons learned of MAF war fighters who led the execution of these incredibly complex operations, which were studded with tactical risks and strategic effects speed bumps, especially since they often required miracles from the mere mortals leading them.

No such surfeit exists. There are a smattering of articles and reports, such as Col Clifton L. "Cliff" Bray's outstanding, jaw-dropping case study on the 86th Contingency Response Group's (CRG) involvement in Operation Shining Hope in Tirane, Albania, and a few "lessons learned" documents that are mostly from Army institutions. There appears to be little tangible, strategically crosscutting guidance that a MAF leader, whether a tanker-airlift control element commander or a director of mobility forces (DIRMOBFOR), could grab onto as he or she enters into what is one of our most difficult missions.

One also would assume, that given the war stories told the world over of the convoluted and thorny nature of these operations, surely the MAF must be teaching its student DIRMOBFORs the nature, doctrine, strategic implications, and practical execution of these operations from the strategic perspective. My contacts with the Air Mobility Warfare Center—owners of the DIRMOBFOR course—did not show that to be so.